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Once upon a time, there was this concept of a "tight script". It wasn't so much about the quality of the dialog, so much as making sure every element of the film was telegraphed in advance. Some character is going to have a heart attack at a crucial moment? Show him taking his statins, maybe have his wife nag him about them. There was an understanding that payoffs were more satisfying when they'd been set up. Maybe this is just catering to midwits so they can point at the screen and feel smart that they understood a callback. Maybe, when you are building out a fiction, you need to signpost the elements of the real world that are in play or not so the audience isn't constantly wondering what from the infinite array of all possibilities is on the table here.
I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.
At one point I read some article about the "Asian" method of story telling, which is less about set up and pay off, and more about doing whatever ass pulls are necessary to arrive at the scenes the director wants. The best of these films, if this is at all true, come off as surreal journey's through a director's id. Gozu comes to mind.
I swear we're getting the worst of both worlds. Scripts with zero set up and zero payoff, with none of the coherent vision or creativity of an auteur. A lot can be forgiven if it's done with style. All we get anymore is a 30 producer's coke fueled rantings filtered through a writer's room full of cynical activist who've ruined their lives with their poor choices and worse beliefs, with visual effects produced by some sweatshop.
Sounds like they took Chekhov’s gun and dialed it up to 11, as it were
I think they dialed it to 6
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